Manal El Mazbouh is a Lebanese PhD researcher based in Aotearoa New Zealand, with a current focus on the whys and hows of the implementation of educational management information systems (EMIS) in development contexts. Using a critical realist lens, she examines the implications of an increasingly data-driven culture that seeks to “quantify” education. Manal is actively collaborating with scholars in Finland, exploring how to navigate the intertwined roles of researcher, advocate, and activist—both within and beyond academia.
In a world marked by deep polarization and growing complexity, where personal and professional ethics, our sense of justice, and our very humanity have come under fire, navigating these roles and spaces has become deeply personal and pressing for her. As a migrant in New Zealand, Manal reflects on last year’s violent attacks on Lebanon and its people—an assault that persists today*—and the cognitive dissonance of witnessing it from afar.
*This piece was written in October 2024, yet its relevance tragically endures. The genocide in Gaza continues unabated, as do the bombings in Lebanon and Syria. Even more insidiously, the silence of many around the world in the face of these atrocities also remains unchanged.
2023 will forever in my mind be associated with the war on Gaza for reasons as many as the thousands who fell victim to the Israeli bombs. It was a singular, terrifying experience to watch people who looked like my parents, my grandparents, my siblings, uncles and aunts, my nieces and nephews suffer horror after horror, torn apart by bombs, burned by white phosphorus, disintegrated into dust, and even when buried in mass graves have their bodies desecrated after death. Seeing those faces kills a part of me every day; hearing the deafening silence of governments of the world, or worse, the statements of their ‘unconditional support’ for an ongoing genocide makes me feel like the world has forsaken its own humanity – and lost its soul.. I watch building after building – cement, metal, and stone – crumple like a house of cards; utterly surreal – and I know inside those buildings, lives and dreams have ended, others ruined beyond repair. I fall asleep to the sounds of screams, the whistle of bombs, and then that eerie silence before the inevitable ringing explosion when they land – sounds I sadly know well from my own experience. For the past year, the images and stories coming out of Gaza have brought back these memories along with nightmares that feel eerily real. I too sleep under the rubble every night, my voice hoarse, choking on my own blood, with planes and drones flying above me, and I too drag myself from under those blocks of cement every morning, crawling as I pulled the pieces of myself back together as best I can to face another day, only to find more of the same.
A year later, and it is my homeland that is embroiled in this war ( the second large-scale assault I’ve witnessed in my lifetime), and all the horrors I saw visited by Israelis on Gaza have been visited upon us– it is indeed the faces of my own people that I see, the devasted, fear-filled faces of my family and friends, places I recognize in our cities and villages destroyed or devastated beyond repair. Being myself away from danger, here in New Zealand, means that I am physically ‘safe,’ but everything I am, my heart and soul lies shattered into a million pieces, struggling to beat amongst a ravaged people on a ravaged land. I fear sleep; my dreams filled with the same horrors I see when I am awake. I no longer ask my family how they are – I just ask if everyone is alive; that is now the only measure of our existence. The rest of our brief phone calls are filled with silence – there is nothing left to say; all we can do is endure.
This new installment of the war of terror started on Tuesday, September 17th, 2024, when various devices, including pagers, walkie talkies and solar panels exploded over the course of two days, killing 39 and wounding over 3,250. These devices, used by doctors, deliverymen and countless other professionals, had been intercepted and planted with explosives then detonated– but few around the world called this what it was: terrorism, because it was directed at the faceless brown hordes of the Middle East. On Monday, September 23rd, we entered into full-blown war, with the southern and western parts of Lebanon especially being targeted by Israeli airstrikes. Yet, few are aware of the human toll of the ongoing Israeli assault on Lebanon, devastating entire communities and destroying civilian infrastructure. The airstrikes have killed more than 1,100 people with nearly 10,000 injured; a million Lebanese civilians (one fifth of the population) have fled their homes in less than two weeks. Still, the world seems to be content to watch in silence. Or worse, portray this war of terror, through the distorted lens of a biased narrative, where the deaths of the Palestinians and Lebanese are simply collateral damage.
It is a struggle to articulate the feeling of watching your country being attacked, to explain the guilt and the helplessness you feel, both of which are compounded by a cognitive dissonance on so many levels. A dissonance engendered by the disconnect between the terror you feel in your heart and mind as opposed to the safety of your physical being, by the conflicting desire to simultaneously remain in the safety of your current location and to return home to your friends and family despite the danger. It is also a cognitive dissonance of being forced to look at events through the distorting filter of the Western media – an account that is not just a misalignment between two narratives, but an insistence that what is happening to Palestine and Lebanon is right and good, no matter how barbaric or savage. A dissonance between the sanitized language of the Western media describing the ‘conflict,’ the ‘airstrikes’ and the ‘incursions,’ with no mention of the human cost, misrepresenting the visceral experience that I know my people in Lebanon are going through. Perhaps the greatest dissonance is continuing to hear the international community invoke human rights, call for respect for international law, and insist on a rules-based order while being unwilling, or worse, unable to say or do anything of real impact to uphold that law, those rights, and that order, to halt the bloodshed and slaughter that has been going on for 76 years. But perhaps it is because, to many around the world, there is no dissonance; it’s just news about a distant people in a distant land. Perhaps to them, our pain and our suffering does not matter, because they do not consider us human, so the world continues to watch us burn in silence and …turns away.
This is a follow up piece, written in August of 2025, which I refuse to dress in argument, analysis, evidence, or worse, in numbers. This is not an intellectual plea, but a reaching out, not as a writer to a reader, but as a soul weathered by sorrow and grief, speaking to another who might understand – human to human.
On Bearing Witness
It’s been a struggle since October 2023, and now even more so, for me to understand the world’s engagement with the ongoing assault on Gaza and Lebanon. My struggle stems not only from the fear I feel as I watch my loved ones in Lebanon continue to be embroiled in this war, not even from the daily horror and agony of watching a genocide unfold live on our screens, but as a direct result of the apathy with which so many in the world have responded to the terrifying images of a people being deliberately, methodically tortured and erased. The responses I’ve gotten from some of the people around me since then, and the message we’ve been receiving worldwide with regard to the genocide is “Turn away. Nothing to see here folks”, as if this were normal. When I’ve expressed shock, pain and sorrow, as have others in real life and online, we’ve had people simply dismiss us: “Don’t put yourself through this; stop watching the news” as if this game of pretend and denial means that the atrocities aren’t happening. Worse, others try to reduce it to personal involvement: “Make sure your family finds safety. As long as they’re okay you don’t have to be so upset.” Is that what we are all doing now? Should we all just look away as long as it’s someplace else? As long as we and our loved ones are safe?
I’ve always wondered at this ability to disengage, to just turn away – this is a privilege I’ve never had and a skill I never learned. How can I pretend not to see those suffering the reality of what I just described in Gaza and Lebanon? How can I pretend when they keep getting up day after day, despite the horror, the wounds, the losses of life and limb, the losses of hopes and dreams, the betrayal of the world that left them to their fate? How do I turn away when I see Palestinians hold on to their faith and thank God even when they bury entire families and children? How do I turn away when I watch them persevere, holding on to what’s left of their homes and families, risking life and limb to save the injured with nothing but their bare hands, to find food to feed their families despite the real and present danger, and doing it with such strength, dignity and compassion? How do I turn away from their continued pain and suffering? How do I turn away and remain human?
And now that the Palestinians in Gaza are being systematically starved, I want to turn away more than words can describe, not out of indifference but from sheer terror and anguish. I want to cower in a corner and hide from the images and stories of torture, death and starvation; from atrocities I feel complicit in not because of what I have done but because of what I have not been able to do. I have no words to describe the agony, the guilt and the shame that consume me as I bear witness to the suffering of the people of Gaza, as I watch them starve to death with food waiting just beyond the blockade, helpless to make any meaningful change. Every day I ask myself: Is posting enough? Is boycotting enough? Is telling people about Palestine and Gaza enough? Is going to marches enough? I often look around with utter consternation – how can people just gloss over this and live their lives like nothing is happening? What is it going to take to get people to see? To act?
I’ve attempted to engage with this ongoing assault through intellectual frameworks and scholarship, yet I feel frames of international law and human rights, and our academic claims of ethics and social justice, falter and collapse in the face of such relentless brutality. The ongoing nature of the genocide also makes it truly difficult to take a step back into theorizing; I find myself unable, and unwilling, to retreat into intellectual discourse. Also, in many spaces I fear intellectual and academic modes of engagement have succeeded in turning a simple, fundamental right – the right of a people to live and to do so with dignity and self-determination – into a labyrinth of false complexity and misleading nuance. To me, the clearest frame remains a human one.
Within that frame, the Gazan genocide is a human catastrophe – a test of our humanity that we are all failing. Perhaps it’s because we do not recognize that in many ways this is more catastrophic for the rest of us than it is for the Palestinians. The Palestinians in Gaza have had their lives and their very bodies systematically destroyed, but their spirit has remained undaunted, undefeated, and unmarred. The rest of us, forced to watch and have every effort to stop this genocide thwarted, are the ones that who’ve had our spirits maimed and crippled – mortally wounded and damaged – in ways I feel more lasting because the powers that be made us complicit in their genocide and helpless against the utter depravity of it. Perhaps what this genocide has also shown is that many of us have grown so numb, so inured to the suffering of other human beings, that we that we no longer feel the blood seeping beneath our own skin.
I, for one, refuse to be numb. I’ve chosen and will continue to choose to bear witness to this horror, to bear the agony of watching and remembering, then and now, and to do what I can. I will not turn away from the nightmare the people of Gaza (and Lebanon) are living no matter the cost to myself – a price I willingly, consciously pay – because it is the least I can do. My people and the people of Gaza and every oppressed, persecuted people in this world (and there are many more than we choose to acknowledge) deserve more, infinitely more, than silence and apathy, but at the very least we deserve to have our suffering acknowledged and remembered because we matter – not because the world bestows mattering on us but because we simply, inherently, do matter.
Our pain and suffering deserve to be witnessed – that is the barest grace we are owed. We know no one is coming to save us – that is the truth that has etched itself into my bones over the last few weeks as I watched children waste into skeletons from hunger and people gunned down for the simple act of seeking food with barely a ripple of response worldwide. And that is the cruelest realization – that despite watching our suffering and death, the world still refuses to look at us, recognize our pain, or see us as human. My only consolation is that I now understand that experiencing this anguish with and for a people being dehumanized, brutalized and annihilated every single day is all that allows me to remain somewhat … human.
June Jordan penned Apologies to All the People in Lebanon nearly twenty years ago, yet her words, her imagery, the language and the narratives she portrays echo powerfully today in every story, report and photo emerging from Gaza and Lebanon and every story, report and photo about Gaza and Lebanon. I invite you to (re)read the poem here and perhaps consider how it speaks to and of the injustice we continue to witness.
